


To Forget

by EllaStorm



Category: The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: AU from Chapter 3, F/M, I have no idea where this came from, mentions of Annie and Peeta, set during Mockingjay Pt. 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-02 01:24:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5228564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllaStorm/pseuds/EllaStorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's this or insanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am genuinely surprised - neither am I active in the Hunger Games fandom, nor have I ever considered seriously shipping a pairing therein. But, as destiny apparently wishes, yesterday evening Finnick/Katniss jumped at me out of nowhere, and I felt the urge to write. Please don't slap me over the head with a chair, SandraMorningstar, I know this is sad. Again. Sorry.

It’s one knot after the other, strung on a thin rope. His hands never rest as he does them, undoes them, redoes them , undoes them again, only to redo them once more. She wonders, watching him, how long this will go on for, until his fingers bleed, until the rope goes soft and falls apart, until he grows old and dies. It’s this or insanity, though, and she wishes for a second she had a rope to tie knots in, too, but her hands are numb. So she contents herself with watching. Knot, undo, redo, knot, undo, redo, knot, undo-

“They aren’t coming back”, he says, staring at the rope. His hands don’t miss a beat, like they work without him. “Not the same.”

“It doesn’t matter”, she answers, and watches him sling the next knot. “We take what’s left.”

“Maybe there is nothing left.”

Something inside her wants to scream, but her lungs do not comply. Instead, she laughs, rough and humourless. It hurts her throat.

Knot, undo, redo, knot.

Again.

The rope slips from his fingers. She catches it before it touches the floor.

That’s when he looks up. There’s not much left of the sea in his eyes.

“We are still here”, she murmurs, unthinking, and hands him the rope back. He keeps it still in his hands, looking at her, like he’s searching her face for something familiar.

“I dream of Annie”, he says, “But I forget what she looks like.”

She nods. She takes the rope from his hands

He pulls her in, and kisses her, hard, and she can taste salt and sugar on his lips. They don’t talk as she pushes him back, as she gets out of her overall, as she sinks down on top of him. He is silent as he comes, but his eyes have more of the sea in them, just then, and she drowns.

“I dream of Peeta”, she says, as she lies on top of him, breathing.

He threads his hands through her hair.

She doesn’t need to say that she forgets, too.

He knows.

 


	2. Chapter 2

She finds that the worst part is the waiting. Waiting for something, anything, to happen, for someone to come back, or be confirmed dead, or drop bombs on their heads. The waiting, she reckons, is the reason why she’s doing this, to keep herself from going slowly insane on concrete walls and thinking too much.

 

“This is just an alternative to tying knots”, she says one day, matter-of-factly, pressed against the wall of a supply closet, Finnick’s breath ghosting over her neck.

 

“I suppose”, he says. His body is a hard line against hers, grounding her, securing her in the present.

 

“I’ve never – more than kissed Peeta, you know.” She doesn’t understand why exactly she tells him now, but she feels like she needs to.

 

“I’m sorry”, he says, after a moment, and it sounds almost guilty.

 

She shakes her head in the dark. “Don’t. This helps.”

 

His next kiss is hard and unapologetic.

 

“This helps”, he echoes against her mouth, and she remembers that _she_ is keeping _him_ together just as well.

 

 

***

 

 

Some nights are bad, and some nights are horrible. Prim gets her through most of the bad ones, but Katniss ensures that Prim never sees the horrible ones, the ones that make her get up, and run to the bathroom to vomit, the ones that force her to sit in the dark for hours, wondering whether it would be less painful to take a knife to her wrists or a gun to her head.

 

It’s on one of these nights that Finnick finds her, wandering the hallways and speaking to herself to stop Peeta’s dead voice from screaming in her ear. Before she knows it, there are arms around her, warm and alive, pulling her in and down to the floor. They sit there for hours, as she drifts in and out of sleep, exhausted, while Finnick holds her, strokes her hair and talks about nothing in particular. She’s not sure, in retrospect, whether she’s just imagining it, but she believes he calls her “Annie” a few times, and she knows that he must have done this before.

 

Four nights after that she hears his voice down the corridor, and when she gets up and finds him, he’s distraught and helpless, fourteen again after his first kill. She’s never done this, not like he has, but she’s following his lead, pulling him down with her and cradling his head in her lap until he stops shaking.

 

It becomes another one of their habits, after that, like meeting in supply closets for a few desperate minutes during the day, they start finding each other on horrible nights.

It helps. Despite everything. It helps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So - apparently this is going to become a longer story. Huh. Who would've thought.


	3. Chapter 3

District 8 happens. The Capitol starts dropping bombs on them, and Katniss is positive that the waiting is over. When she sees the roses, she knows for sure.

 

***

 

That night, Finnick talks to save lives. He talks, and he tells all his secrets to Castor’s camera, save for one. Katniss wishes, and hopes, and prays that it will be enough.

It isn’t. The power goes back on, and she starts speaking to a microphone, panicked, frantic, until Snow appears on screen and shatters all the hope she had into a million pieces.

It’s the worst night of her life.

 

***

 

It gets even worse, sitting next to Finnick, waiting for the inevitable. When Haymitch finally arrives, his eyes dark and bloodshot, with only a whispered “sorry” and too much alcohol on his lips, Finnick stands, and leaves. She cries, and yells, and doesn’t feel Haymitch’s hands on her back, or his soft words in her hair.

 

Peeta.

 

Gale.

 

 _Peeta._  

 

Finnick was right all along. There’s nothing left.

 

***

 

The next few days are a blur. She doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, doesn’t do anything, until Prim forces soup down her throat one morning with reproach and tears in her eyes, screaming _“Don’t you dare do what Mum did!”_ before she breaks down and clings to Katniss like a lifeline, sobbing apologies into her overall.

 

Katniss cradles her sister in her arms for about half an hour, remorse flooding her stomach, and vows to stop acting like her mother once and for all.

 

***

 

She hasn’t seen Finnick for about a week, when she finds him sitting on the concrete floor outside her room, staring into space, while his fingers are busy tying an unusually complicated knot. His eyes are drained.

 

She sits next to him, close enough to share her body heat, and lets her knee touch his.

 

“I’m going to miss the sky”, he mutters, some time later. It’s the only thing he says. Katniss doesn’t think much of it.

 

***

 

Still, she wakes up in the middle of that night, remembering the sea having left his eyes, and suddenly it becomes terrifyingly clear to her what he meant. In a matter of seconds she is out of her bed and running down the corridor. She arrives in his sleeping quarters just in time to see him tie a noose around his neck, his fingers working the knot as swiftly as they’ve always done, like they have been practicing for this all along. He looks so peaceful right then that she considers, just for a second, to let him be, but her heart hammers a desperate I CAN’T – I CAN’T – I CAN’T against her ribcage, so she falls to her knees instead and begs him to stop. Tells him that she needs him, in his pain and suffering and all his broken parts, because if he does this, she will not be able to resist doing the same, and she can’t do that to Prim, to her Mum, they need her just as she needs _him,_ and _don’t Finnick, don’t._

_Don’t. Please._

 

To her surprise, he stops.

 

She takes the rope from his neck, pulls him down onto the mattress and lies, her forehead to his back, hand over his heart, listening to the sobs crashing into his body like waves.

 

 

The next morning he marches down to the shooting range to collect his trident.

 

There’s steely determination in his eyes, and that, Katniss tells herself, is better than nothing.


	4. Chapter 4

As it turns out, the Capitol is less than prepared for their combined rage.

 

Katniss believes that, maybe, if Snow had been more cunning, just a little more clever, he would have let Peeta and Annie go, broken as they were, and left it to Finnick and her to painstakingly put them back together; but they’re dead – dead and gone, and as much as it has ruined them, it has made them stronger, angrier, also.

 

Finnick has nothing left to lose and Katniss has more than enough to avenge, and when she looks at him, it’s like a mirror, reflecting a wrath powered with too much pain, back and forth, back and forth, _if we burn, you burn with us_. (Johanna Mason is dead, too, but Katniss can't help but think of her these days when she sees Finnick, when she sees herself, and finally understands the overwhelming need to slam an axe into every available surface.)

 

Coin starts sending them on missions in the Districts, because she knows rage, and she knows what to do with it, channels theirs just as much as she has been channelling hers for years, a swinging trident and arrows that never miss, water and fire, the Golden Boy and the Mockingjay.

 

In the span of only four weeks, the Districts rise, and the Capitol falls.

 

(Snow commits suicide by nightlock. Katniss can’t help but laugh when she hears.)

 

It doesn’t feel much like a victory.

 

 

***

 

Eventually, after the war is won, after President Coin has started her new government, after nobody has tried to kill them for weeks, their rage subsides and makes space for grief again, because they’re not Johanna Mason after all, and they won’t be angry for the rest of their lives.

 

Katniss doesn’t move back to 12 (she can’t, because _Peeta_ , because _Gale_ ), and Finnick doesn’t move back to 4 (he can’t, because _Annie_ ), and so they stay in the Capitol, their rooms door to door (because Katniss remembers the noose around his neck, and neither of them trusts him about that, once the steel is gone from his eyes).

 

Prim, who stays, who blossoms, who becomes a doctor (if she wasn’t already one in the first place), makes sure that Katniss doesn’t fall back into her stupor, and Katniss makes sure to keep ropes out of Finnick’s reach.

 

She hasn’t tried to come onto him ever since Annie died, not even when they were both burning bright in their rage – she isn’t sure how he would cope, whether he would cope at all -, even if she misses the comfort. What she does do, though, is resume her habit of rushing to his room on his horrible nights. He can’t do the same for her (he doesn’t have Prim, he has nothing), but he still lets her hold him, and maybe this is how it works, how it’s supposed to be.

 

***

 

She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but one day, out of the blue, he cracks a joke and smiles at her at lunch. It’s tired, and worn, and broken, but it’s a smile nonetheless.

 

For a second, there’s a little green in his eyes.

 

 

***

 

The following night he visits, small, sneaking steps into her room, and she’s searching for a weapon, panicked, before she recognises the flash of bronze in the dark.

 

“Didn’t mean to startle you.”

 

She sighs relief. “Even Prim startles me sometimes.”

 

They stay silent for a few moments, and she wonders whether she should switch on the light. In the end, she chooses not to. This is easier, has always been easier, without seeing each other’s face.

 

He comes closer, slowly, and she only finds that he has reached her bedside when she feels the mattress dip.

 

“I guess we’re all on guard. That’s nothing that ever really wears off”, he says, and lies down. They’re not touching, but she feels his heat next to her.

 

“I keep thinking about what you said”, he adds. “Before.”

 

She doesn’t need to ask _before what_.

 

“You said _this helps_.” There’s a soft touch to her cheek, and she wants so badly, selfishly, to just take it, take _him_ without a second thought, but too many people have done that to him before, so she holds back.

 

“I don’t want you to...”

 

The fingers disappear from her cheek in an instant.  “I understand.”

 

“It’s not that I don’t…” She’s never been good with words, not like him. The dark makes it easier to say, though, and she’s glad she left the lights off. “I miss – that. But I don’t want you to feel. To feel obliged. Just because I said –“

 

She is interrupted, shockingly, by a kiss pressed to her lips. It’s fierce and tastes like saltwater, and it makes something inside her sing.

 

“I have fucked too many people in my life out of obligation, Katniss Everdeen. I’m not doing it again.”

 

That’s when she surges upwards and takes his mouth like a starved thing, and it helps, it does, it does, it _does_ , even now, even after everything, when he holds her down and pushes into her, all strength and remembrance of living.

 

Afterwards, they both cry, clinging to each other, and that’s when she knows that she was wrong before, because _this_ is how they work, have always worked, combined tears and jagged edges that somehow fit together.

 

She sleeps without nightmares.


End file.
